


Worth Its Constancy

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Episode: s09e19-20 The Truth, F/M, Missing Scene, Romance, Smut, motel sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 07:26:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14732540
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: Mulder and Scully have not been alone together for a very long time. What happens when they stop at their first motel on the way to New Mexico?





	Worth Its Constancy

**Author's Note:**

> This is a stand-alone story (in a possible series of vignettes) exploring moments from the series post-Requiem. Canon, for me, ends after season seven, but there’s a lot that I love and want to explore from the material that came after. May be closer to a "Mature" rating, but I rounded up out of caution.

_+_

Their escape was frenetic as they were shoved into an unfamiliar SUV and pointed toward Canada. Mulder’s hard, determined eye did not meet hers as he defied orders—unsurprising—and angled the massive vehicle southward instead.

“Mulder, Kersh told us to go north. You just got on a road going south.”

“That’s right.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see a man about the truth.”

It was late enough that the highway was mostly empty, rather than its usual sea of taillights. The unfamiliar vacancy lent it an alien quality. Scully should have known it would end like this, shooting into the darkness of I-95 in an unmarked car with fake passports and a fistful of someone else’s cash in her pocket. Was that where her compass needle began pointing when she stepped into his office a decade ago?

“Mulder.”

He shook his head, jaw clenched, and refused to meet her eye. He was rigid with tension, surely traumatized by his time in that filthy cell, but forever unwilling to do anything but launch himself deeper, headlong and screaming into the monsters’ lair. Her Mulder, blindly fumbling toward answers with both arms outstretched, heedless of everything else around him.

She’d been here before. She knew now was not the time to push. But she was not untraumatized herself, and she needed, suddenly and desperately, for him to look at her. “Please, Mulder.”

He must have heard the desperation in her voice; his grip on the steering wheel loosened slightly and the sound of his deep inhale lowered the tension inside the car. “We can’t go to Canada, Scully.” He swallowed, and finally turned to look at her. There was a wildness in his eyes that she recognized. A dangerous wildness. Panic took hold in her then, the same terror that had gripped her when Doggett recounted the phone call in her apartment. Mulder had readied himself for death, and was not yet willing to let it go. He looked away.

She forced herself to breathe before speaking. “Can we stop soon?”

A quick furrow of his brow: irritation. “We just got started. You need a break already?”

“No, Mulder, _we_ need a break.” She reached out a hand to his forearm where she could feel the strain of his muscle, his slight flinch when her skin touched his.

“We’re still too close to D.C.”

She nodded. “Okay. Let’s get out of Virginia, and then will you stop?”

His chin bobbed, barely, in acquiescence.

_+_

Sharpsburg, North Carolina 3:57 a.m.

It was a dingy motel like any number of others they’d visited, and they took a room with a rear-facing entrance. The smell of stale cigarettes and cheap, all-purpose cleaner. She’d packed both of their bags: practical clothes; a weapon for each of them; a pale blue album with photos of William, half full.

Inside, Mulder dropped his duffel and looked into the bathroom, its overhead fluorescent buzzing to uncertain life. He was calmer now. “I guess the orange jumpsuit stands out a bit.”

She smirked at him, uncomfortable now that they were alone in this sparse room with a single bed that seemed to stare at them expectantly. The air felt dense with tension and with all they needed to say.

“I’m gonna take a shower. It’s been a while.”

Scully nodded and moved to sit on the end of the bed, heart pounding. While he showered, she turned on the TV to distract herself, and found that the rest of the world was still there in all its spectacle-driven stupidity. Slapstick comedies and sappy, unrealistic romances played alongside exaggerated news reports of everyday household dangers. She settled on a _Star Trek_ episode because she found the voices and the sound effects soothing. Mulder would laugh.

Even with the television, the room seemed too quiet. Scully stared at her fingernails, wondering how she could possibly talk to him in all this silence.

The shower stopped with a _clunk_ of the pipes, and a few minutes later Mulder emerged spiky-haired with a towel around his waist. Her heart thudded in her chest again at the sight of him, not only from nerves, but from the pulse of desire she felt suddenly permitted to feel again.

He noticed her looking and smiled awkwardly. “Forgot my shorts,” he said, turning to dig in his bag. She turned off the TV.

“Mulder, come here for a minute,” she said, voice thick.

He stood up from his rummaging, pair of boxers in hand, and walked over to her. Concern wrinkled his brow for a brief moment until he read what was on her face: a potent combination of anguish and lust.

“You okay, Scully?”

She smiled at him in a way that hurt: her eyes so sad. “You,” she said. She touched his bare chest, let her fingers splay out across his heart. “Mulder, it’s you. You’re here.” Steady thump-thump against her palm; droopy eyes narrowing in concern. That hair, damp and sticking in every direction. Without warning, she was crying, hitching sobs that ached in her chest, even as she found herself wanting him to strip her naked and throw her onto the bed. It was a confusing, overwhelming combination of feeling.

Mulder let the boxers he was holding fall to the floor as he took her in his arms, one hand on her head, the other curled around her hip. She was crying against and kissing his chest at the same time. “You can’t keep doing this to me,” she whispered. “You can’t die again.”

His eyes slammed shut and he grunted as the force of her words jolted against his well-armored defenses. “Dana…” she was melting him. He was afraid to lose his resolve.

“I’ve never wanted your sacrifice, Mulder,” she said. Her mouth moved to his clavicle; small kisses over the bone. His left hand was sliding up under her shirt. “I’ve only ever wanted you.” The wet heat of her tongue, briefly against his neck.

“Ah, Scully,” he said. His right hand joined the left, unconsciously fumbling to unhook the back clasp of her bra. His sacrifice came easy; letting himself be loved did not. Just as he felt the _snick_ and loosening of the fabric, she pulled back to look him in the eye.

“Please,” she said, both hands moving to cup his jaw, her thumbs caressing his lips, only just. “Please come back to me. Please love me.” Her words: hardly a whisper, eyes still shining with tears.

He was gone, then, his resolve in utter ruins at his feet. He nodded against her hands while his own slipped up, up and around under her bra. She arched toward him.

“I can do that,” he said just before his lips collided with hers in a hot storm.

Their coupling was dark and sweet, a testimony of their separation and longing. He made quick work of her clothes; she even quicker of his towel, and then he was backing her to the bed, hands buried in her hair, swelling her lips with the force of his kiss. Her hands wouldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop touching him, grasping as if for dear life, and then she was pulling him, down down into the sheets and into her.

“Now. Please.”

“Yes.”

Then he was so deep in her she swore she could feel it in her ribs; her hands in his hair, her mouth on his neck, his cheek, and then more kisses, lava-hot while he rocked into her again and again. She rolled them over so she could ride him as his fingers bruised her hips with his desperation, his love. There were tears on his cheeks because his heart hurt for her, for this, and the thought that he’d been ready to give it up. It had been almost two years, two years, since he’d touched her like this, felt her swallow him whole with her body, tasted her nipples, touched the slick-hot center of her. He was not dead. The cold ground would not hold him, could not, while this love was here waiting for him. How stupid he’d been to think he could give this up like some self-righteous ascetic, a martyr. But he couldn’t think about that anymore because she was pulsing around him, hovering over him with sex-wild hair and ravenous eyes. He hadn’t seen her like this since before William and he was mad with it.

“Scullyscullyscully oh god Dana, yes.” They fumbled toward each other in the dim light, grasping in the dark and coming hard in the shadowy humid room, together again at last.

_+_

Afterward, he came apart in her arms like wet tissue. He broke, sobbed against her naked breasts for every moment they’d been held apart, for that brief moment he’d spotted her on a train platform with her heart on her sleeve, for the lies he’d had to tell in that filthy jail cell. For William.

She squeezed him to her, so grateful for his tears.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”

When he had spent all the tears he could, he kissed her sternum and raised his head to meet her eyes. “Scully,” he said.

“I’m here.”

They were drowning in the intensity of their look, taking gulps of each other with their eyes. His thumb came up to graze her cheekbone, palm to jaw. “I missed you.”

She made that expression that was somehow both a smile and a sob at once. “Oh God, Mulder.” Their fingers entangled, then, on the sheets between them, between their not-quite aligned chests. The pillow was damp under his hair, their noses inches apart. “You have no idea.”

He nodded and leaned in to kiss her again. Slowly, sweetly, they came together a second time, drunk with relief and love in the pre-dawn hour. Afterwards they slept, entwined, for hours.

By noon, they were back on the road heading south, then west. They had to see a man about the truth.

—–

End note: the title comes from P.B. Shelley’s short poem “To the Moon.”

Thanks for reading. Please let me know what you think. 

tumblr: spookydarlablack


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